The Lighter – Valparaiso University Literary Magazine
Fall 2007, Volume 53, Issue 1

Fingernails clinging to fingers and one thumb, blossoming from a palm attached to a wrist. Hands holding and sculpting and dancing and loving. Beckon someone forward. Hold someone back. Our lives were built on hands. Fingers and wrists and palms. Bricks made by hand piled upon each other by more hands and applauded by more and more hands. Hands carry us into the world and throw us out. Fingers around our necks, the handle of a gun or knife or wooden spoon. Hands can speak: words and sentences and proper nouns and all without the use of lips, teeth or a tongue. They can snap and clap and tap and even pat in their own languages. Hand shake when scared. Tremble when angry. Shiver when cold. How could they lie?

Look at your palm. Go ahead. Do it. Unclench your fist; unravel your fingers from the drink you are holding. Just look at your palm. Look at the creases and lines, how deep or shallow they are. Follow the line that starts between your first and second fingers to where it seems to slide off the side of your hand. Find triangles and stars and criss-crossed lines. Think of what sort of things your head, heart and hands have gone through to receive those lines. You might be a skeptic, but you can’t deny that those lines sure are fascinating. They swell and shorten and attach themselves to other lines. Sometimes they disappear.

I don’t really know what got me into palm reading. It seems silly to think of a young girl obsessing over it. I think of it as something so adult now. Something that shouldn’t be taken lightly or played around with. I catch myself always trying to peek at people’s palms, the shapes of their fingernails, the way they clench their fists. It is all supposed to mean something. like the arrangement of the stars on the day they were born. Or the placement of the letters in the spelling of their names. It’s just one more thing to take into consideration, just a small part of the complicated game of figuring people out. Or maybe it’s cheating.

LaDonna Sorensen, my father’s mother, decided to get her palm read. I don’t know where or why or the exact year, but it happened. It’s impossible for me to know all of the details of this story because it occurred long before I was a twinkle in my parent’s eyes. Before they were even a spark in each other hearts. My grandma isn’t the type to lie or use her imagination extensively. But she went to a palm reader and amongst the other trivial facts and figures they most likely spit out at her, she was given a date of a future car accident that was going to involve my father. As soon as she left, she ranted about what a load of bullshit it was to predict a date for a car accident. My grandpa, always the more imaginative one of the couple, took it for truth. And a short while later, when a phone call came of an accident involving my dad, he shook his head and said:

“Look at what date it is, LaDonna.”

I am sure she shrieked and dropped the phone and maybe cried a little. Her eyes wide and glassy, she decided not to try to foretell the future ever again. It didn’t do anything for her nerves or her blood pressure.

More than a few years back, my mother got her palm read at a flea market. There were long aisles full of bad imitations of brand name trinkets. I skipped along from booth to booth, holding my dad’s hand and pointing out all of the thing he coudl buy me. He saw junk; I saw glorious toys that could occupy me for at least half an hour. My mom dragged along behind us with my continuously whining little brother. We approached a booth not like the others. A middle-aged woman sat at a little table with a half smile stamped on her face. She might have winked at me. And it is quite possible that I blushed and hid behind my dad’s legs, still clutching his hand. There was something different about this woman. An odd knowledge, or maybe even wisdom, that shimmered around her dark skin. My mom stopped and nodded at my dad. He nodded back and walked with me over to a table nearby with all the plastic Tupperware containers you could ever need. My sister lingered next to my mom as she sat down in a chair across from the old woman, but after a moment, my mom waved her away, along with my brother, towards me and my dad.

I soon got bored with the mountains of plastic and annoyed with my siblings and started inching towards my mother. The look on her face was somehow hopeful and dismayed at the same time. The fortune-teller was stretching my mom’s hand and flattening it. Spreading it across the table and tracing the lines with her own fingers. A few years later, when the things the woman said started coming true, my mother told me more of what the fortuneteller had whispered across the table. She had said she was from Minnesota (and outlined a large “M” in the middle of her palm, which I couldn’t distinguish from the other lines), she was in the midst of a good and long-lasting marriage and a bit of adversity was in store for her within the next few years.

But the warnings didn’t keep my mother from falling into the gossipy little traps that come with having sister-in-laws and she still ended up depressed and wallowing in a hopeless, cigarette smoke-filled mess. Knowing about what was to happen didn’t help her any more than watching a weather report can keep a tornado from inching closer.

My mother is small and delicate. She thinks she could always lose a few extra pounds. Her shoulders are narrow and her hips are round and I think of her as petite. Her eyes are watery and she hates the red that always seems to seep out of her hair everytime she dyes it. Her childhood wasn’t very nice. When I was little, she used to tell stories to me and my siblings about seeing Santa Clause in the sky outside her window and how her dad worked in a hardware store and she used to wear her brother’s sweaters to school. She didn’t tell us then how her birthday was never celebrated; she was left at home to tend to her five siblings while her parents left town to gamble and drink and have the time of their lives. She definitely did not tell us about the time she made poms but couldn’t stay on the team because her father refused to pick her up from school. She was cutting into his drinking time. Her family jumped from town to town attempting to escape her parents’ debts. Living out of trailer homes and off of sloppy joes.

She doesn’t tell many people any of that. It isn’t the type of conversation that her new suburban friends want to hear over lunch. They want to talk about new cars and how well their youngest son did on his last report card. God forbid she bring up anything real; anything that might make these women shift uncomfortably in their seats. So she picks what to leave out in conversation. Tells them that she grew up in a large family in Minnesota and leaves it at that. But if these women could read palms, I mean really read palms, they could read between the shrugs of her shoulders and shifts of her eyes. Some lines fade, but not the ones you carry around from the past.

For a solid block of three or four years after my mother got her palm read, I would walk up every weekday morning with my eyes burning. Smoke filled my bedroom and even with the door closed, every molecule of air was affected. My eyes were heavy and sore, my throat was tight. It hurt when I breathed. I would approach the living room with a dissastisfied scowl. And there my mother would be: puffing away on cigarette after cigarette and drinking coffee or a diet soft drink, staring at the TV as yet another soap opera flittered across the screen. I was disappointed and I made every extra effort to make that clear. Wearing my D.A.R.E. shirt, telling my mom how common cancer was. But she just kept smoking. And crying.

She hid it from my dad. She would smoke right after he left for work and stop long before he came home. She assumed he never knew because he never said anything. She sprayed air fresheners and cleaned out the ashtray and hid her cigarettes in a cabinet she didn’t think he ventured into.

I threatened to tell dad but I never had to. The guilt finally got to her and she decided to tell him herself. They went out to a fancy dinner, it might have been their anniversary. She sat across the table and said there was something she needed to tell him. I’m sure that he got flustered and his eyes got a bit wider.

She told him she had taken up smoking. He relaxed and told her he thought she was going to tell him that she was having an affair. I’m sure they both laughed in a relieved sort of way.

My sister got her palm read on a pier in Cape Cod one summer for five dollars. My family and I stood out of hearing distance while it was going on. I was scared that they were going to tell her that she was about to die. She came out of it not believing a thing. She told us that it was all lies and none of it was going to come true. I asked her for specifics but all she would tell me is that the woman said she was going to become a teacher someday and my sister would rather die than teach. She isn’t a teacher yet, but sometimes I remind her that it’s still an option.

Even with the women in my family delving into palm reading, I didn’t think much of it until my innocent little mind skipped across some books a few years later. I was soon hooked into the lines of patchwork maps covering everyone’s palms. I couldn’t get enough of it. I read gobs of books.

In the seventh grade, I went to Sarah Dubenic’s birthday party and I brought all of my books about palm reading. I stayed up half the night with my flashlight telling people how kind their palms said they were, how likely they were to fall in love. Nothing they didn’t already know themselves.

But the books didn’t tell me everything. I couldn’t stop staring at my own palms wondering what I was missing. The books never told me why it looks like I have criss-crossed stars under three of my fingers. Why my fate line, the line running down the center of your palm, usually below your middle finger, is so choppy on one hand but loopy and winding on the other.

I’ve never gotten my palm read. I am always scared they are going to tell me I’m going to die or that I will end up lost and alone and full of hatred. I just want to know what I should be doing. I want someone to tell me when to give up hope and when to hold out for something really great. But maybe the lines on your palm don’t really say any of that. Maybe those wrinkly old women reading palms can just hear it in your voice; see it in the droop of your shoulders.

I met a boy with almond-shaped fingernails and fingertips that tapered at the ends. It was supposed to mean that he was romantic and tender. Maybe I put too much effort into believing that was true. Giving him extra chances when I shouldn’t have even glanced at his elegant palms in the first place. He stomped on my heart (figuratively of course) and I haven’t really read many palm reading books since. I still think about it sometimes and steal glimpses of people’s hands, but it hardly goes beyond that. I am not one to hold someone’s palm flat and breathe heavily over it, telling them how deep their heart line is and how that means they are a little too passionate for the standards of today’s society.

Our hands don’t lie, people do. They wither and fall off of their loft pedestals and sometimes they disappear.